Medicine: Are Patients People?

Medical journals are generally full of straight, double or tall talk
from and about doctors. For a change, some back talk from a patient has
appeared in the British journal Lancet. This particular patient was so
fed up that she went on for five columns. The burden of her complaint:
hospital patients are not treated like grownup human beings.

Medicine & Manners. Medical care in a hospital is fine, the anonymous
patient wrote, but medical manners are terrible. First of all, she was
kept waiting around in the clinic, "on the principle that a minute of
the doctor's time was more valuable...